What is the best software to create an outstanding touchscreen experience?

Interactive touchscreen experiences are a fantastic way to connect with customers, whether at events, tradeshows and exhibitions or in your showroom or marketing suite. They are intuitive to use, look great, by creating a sense of WOW, and can help to project a brand as innovative and dynamic.

Not only that, but they can really help to simplify complex ideas, products and services and demonstrate them visually. Which goes a long way to making them memorable and quick to understand.

And where businesses may not be able to meet with customers or attend events, interactive touchscreen experiences are ideal for staying connected with customers. Depending on the software, they can be shared over the web or used to create virtual demo spaces for customers to explore in their own time.

What is an interactive touchscreen experience?

Firstly, a quick overview of what a touchscreen experience is. There are two main parts:

1. The hardware — This is the physical touchscreen itself and also the PC the visual experience runs on. There are lots of different types of touchscreens, from wall-mounted to touch-tables, stand-mounted as well as custom-built enclosures.
2. The visual experience — This is the content shown on the screen, which people will interact with. It’s this visual content that you’ll need software to create.

What is an interactive touchscreen experience?

Firstly, a quick overview of what a touchscreen experience is. There are two main parts:

1. The hardware — This is the physical touchscreen itself and also the PC the visual experience runs on. There are lots of different types of touchscreens, from wall-mounted to touch-tables, stand-mounted as well as custom-built enclosures.
2. The visual experience — This is the content shown on the screen, which people will interact with. It’s this visual content that you’ll need software to create.

Four main software options for interactive touchscreens

There are quite a few software apps available, but following 20 years of experience, these are what we use and recommend for our customers:

1. A Progressive Web App (PWA) — this is a web application built using the latest web technologies and combines some of the benefits of a native app (software that is installed locally to your machine rather than used over the web)
2. Specialist software — which is designed for building touchscreen experiences and interactive digital signage. This would include our own POP platform, and Intuiface, Tumult Hype, eyefactive and Ventuz
3. A web-based digital signage solution — such as Scala, TrouDigital which offer pre-built templated experiences, there are quite a lot of these sorts of companies
4. PowerPoint — for more straightforward experiences.

Our experienced team of designers and developers have encountered the highs and lows of all these solutions for almost every scenario imaginable so here’s our take below.

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A Progressive Web App

A Progressive Web App (PWA) uses the same language, HTML, Javascript and CSS, as a website and is generally used for building websites. However, one of the main differences for touchscreen scenarios is that the experience you build as a PWA can be installed on a local machine so that it can run offline. You don’t need any specialist players installed to view an experience it just runs through any modern browser like Edge or Chrome.

A PWA is a very sophisticated option, allowing you to create almost any type of experience you can imagine. You can include videos, PDFs, presentations, 3D models, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality into the experience and connect to other applications such as your CRM or DAMs.

A word of caution though! A touchscreen is a very different user experience for a user from a website, even for those of us used to Smartphones. You’re generally dealing with a much bigger screen, which impacts on the layout. Your audience will be using their finger rather than a mouse to move around and interact. Clear prompts and navigation are essential to make it obvious to the user what they need to do. Small differences can have quite far-reaching consequences. Basically, a PWA might be used a lot of building websites but you don’t want a web professional building your touchscreen experience.

Pros of a Progressive Web App:

• Unlike building an experience with specialist software, there is no cost for the software and tools
• You can create really immersive experiences using them
• A PWA can be run through any browser making it accessible. It can also work offline, so an internet connection isn’t necessary for the touchscreen experience to work
• It can easily connect to other systems to pull or push information backwards and forwards. For example, it could connect to an organisation’s Content Management System so any content within those systems can be automatically pulled into your touchscreen experience. Similarly, if you collect customer information through your touchscreen this can be automatically posted back into your CMS for future marketing or sales campaigns
• It is possible to see what your customers are interested in using sophisticated analytics and reporting
• They are very fast, if well-built, especially with more complex experiences

Cons of a Progressive Web App:

• In order to produce a high-quality touchscreen experience as a PWA you would need to be a very accomplished developer You would have to work with a specialist agency
• The cost and time required to build an experience as a PWA may be far too prohibitive, especially if it’s for a one-off event
• There are a lot of technical and UX differences between a website and a touchscreen PWA, which you or your agency would need to be aware of.

Specialist touchscreen software

There are specialist software applications for creating touchscreen experiences. Programs such as Intuiface and EyeFactive are well-established applications for creating professional touchscreen experiences.

Pros of specialist software:

• They have built-in templates to help you get going
• Built-in animation effects
• They support a wide range of external media such as video, PDFs, 3D models, and complex animations
• Some have built-in analytics dashboards or they can be added as an extra
• Experiences can be created for any touchscreen type from tablets up to video walls, so you can make experiences as large as you like to cover multiple displays.

Cons of specialist software:

• It is fairly straightforward to create simple interactive experiences for small businesses or projects. But it can get very complicated if you require something more complex
• If you’re not planning on using a specialist agency you may be limited to the default templates, unless you want to spend some time learning the platforms
• Integration with other systems is possible, but is more complex to do
• Some are only designed to work at one screen resolution, they are not responsive systems (Intuiface is an example of this). This means if you are going to use your touchscreen experience on a large touchscreen, a laptop and tablets most likely they will have different screen ratios (16x9, 16x10 or 4x3 etc.) So although the experience will still work, it won’t fill the screen on all those devices
• The editing software has a license fee to use and each device that will run the touchscreen experience also needs a licence. So, if you have 10 touchscreens running your experience you’ll need 10 licences, so it could be quite expensive.

Now for the good news!

As mentioned above we’ve spent twenty years creating interactive touchscreen experiences all over the world trying out all these different software options. We got so fed up having to either tell customers they couldn’t have what they wanted or trying to work around issues with the available software. It was expensive and time-consuming all round.

So, we built our own POP interactive experiences platform. Take a look at see what can be created…

We have taken the best features from all the different platforms and combined them into one. The key features are:

• As you can see from above you can create almost unlimited types of experiences
• It has a web-based content management system which controls all the information and content in your experience, where ever it is in the world, so you can make instant updates
• The platform allows you to create multiple experience versions, great if you run multiple events with different themes
• The editor is a no-code simple and intuitive system designed for non-technical people to create experiences
• It has full analytics to track all interactions with your experience
• You can share content directly from an experience with viewers, e.g. videos, PDFs, images, product data sheets etc. and a record is sent back to your CRM for lead generation
• As it’s PWA based your experiences can run through a web browser and be installed locally if WiFi is going to be an issue
• You can run experiences on any device and any screen size from tablet up to multi-screen videos walls without any need to change anything
• Best of all the POP team also help customers create their experiences, training them up so they can manage them going forward and always being on hand.

You can find out more about the platform on our website or book a demo.

Web-based digital signage solutions

This option involves creating an experience using online templates that are designed to perform a certain function, such as displaying product information or advertising.

You simply drag and drop the information you need into the template of the web portal and connect your digital signage screens over the internet to the portal, which then displays your content on your digital screens.

Interactive touchscreen wayfinder for Battersea Power Station

Pros of web-based digital signage solutions

• This type of system is very popular for non-interactive digital signage as the content can be updated quickly from any location remotely
• You are limited by the functionality of the system though, so it will only do certain things within the template but some do have a lot of options to cover most use cases
• There are plenty of companies that provide digital signage platforms and they can also help with the hardware and maintenance.

Cons of web-based digital signage solutions

• As it is templated, you won’t have a lot of control over the branding and layout of the experience. But bear in mind, this may not be an issue when the end goal is to create a very simple user experience
• Interactivity is very limited so the user experience can be quite simple and a little boring, you certainly wouldn’t call them immersive. So, if you’re trying to create a personalised customer experience through a touchscreen we’d avoid these systems.

PowerPoint

Don’t laugh or scoff but PowerPoint has very sophisticated interactive features which will let you create touchscreen experiences. You can put a lot of things into them such as video, images, PDFs and 3D elements.

Pros of PowerPoint

• With a good PowerPoint developer you’d be hard-pressed to spot the difference between a PowerPoint experience or a custom-built one with HTML or Intuiface
• It is easy to update as most people can use it
• It could be quicker to build an experience, saving both time and money.

Cons of PowerPoint

• There are some limitations, for example, you can’t capture people’s details, if acquiring new leads is your goal
• More advanced interactions are impossible
• There are no analytics to track what your customers are looking at
• There is no centralised content management system.

Again, we recommend using a presentation design agency or touchscreen specialist. It would still be quite an advanced presentation you’d be creating, and you may not have the in-house skills yourself.

Get in touch about touchscreens!

We hope this has been useful and we’ve managed to shed some light on the various options available when creating an interactive touchscreen experience.

So, if you’re unsure of which solution might be right then download our eBook or book a demo and we can run through your options depending on your requirements.

damjan.haylor@popcomms.com

www.popcomms.com

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Originally published at popcomms.com on October 2, 2016.